Soon you’ll be able to play and program with Minecraft on one of the snazzy little devices. Aron and Daniel have dedicated time to porting a version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition that comes with a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. We’re calling it Minecraft: Pi Edition, and it will be completely free to download.

The possibilities are massive. You could organise the cheapest LAN party of all time, or use the Pi to learn the fundamentals of programming on a miniscule budget. It’s like hacking your way into Minecraft and modifying the game world with code, a bit like being Notch, Jeb, or Nathan, but arguably more fun and less stressful.

mongrol wrote on Nov 25, 2012, 05:20:The Pi doesn't need this. I'd rather my kids learnt how to program the thing rather than how to play games. Open the source and let us learn how Minecraft runs instead. Far more educational.

Without Doom I wouldn't have made maps and got into Arch Drawing in school, then quake engine+ with BSP mapping and me in InfiniD, Bryce, PovRay and 3D Studio, then Unreal and newer engines getting me into boolean modeling and maya based emitters, which got me more into Maya, which got me into Game FX / VFX.

Games have continuously inspired me and knowing I can exit out of Duke 3D and type "editart" and edit some textures quit out of that and in the same environment type "build e1m3.map" and go back into mapping.

I had to have loved these games before I ever wanted to work on them or make assets for them. Maybe in some rare cases I actually cared for the engine at release of the game due to shipping with the map editor ( first Serious Sam ) without caring so much about the actual title, but I still was vested in games already at that point.

mongrol wrote on Nov 25, 2012, 05:20:The Pi doesn't need this. I'd rather my kids learnt how to program the thing rather than how to play games. Open the source and let us learn how Minecraft runs instead. Far more educational.

oook... i dont know if its just me.... buuut... it looks like you didn't read the article at all. like.. not even one word of it. because the main point of the article is that this will help people learn to program.

people.. kids.. generally learn better when they are engaged in something that is visual and fun.

DanteUK wrote on Nov 24, 2012, 18:02:I wonder what they are re-writing, now way that can still be java, memory requirements to high and performance too low.

In Blue's excerpt it states that it is ported from the Pocket Edition, which was written in C++. Keep in mind that Mojang can work from the source and does state "support for multiple programming languages" with regard to the user hacking the game world.